STUDY: Our Galaxy Is Home To Billions Of Habitable Planets

A study published this week suggests that there may be “tens of
billions” of planets in the Milky Way galaxy that fall within
what scientists call “the Goldilocks zone,” where the conditions
for spawning life are thought to exist.

Working with a relatively new technology called the HARPS
spectrograph, located at the La Silla Observatory in Chile,
scientists said that a survey of red dwarf stars in the Milky Way
found that approximately 40 percent had planets orbiting within
the Goldilocks zone. They also estimate there are about 160
billion red dwarf stars in our galaxy.

So far, just nine planets within this zone have actually been
detected, but extrapolations from the survey indicate that
planets falling under this criteria may be exceedingly common
throughout the galaxy. And about 100 are within earth’s cosmic
neighborhood, they said.

“Now that we know that there are many super-Earths around nearby
red dwarfs, we need to identify more of them using both HARPS and
future instruments,” Xavier Delfosse, a researcher with the
Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble in
France, told Space.com editor Clara Moskowitz. “Some
of these planets are expected to pass in front of their parent
star as they orbit — this will open up the exciting possibility
of studying the planet’s atmosphere and searching for signs of
life.”

This video was published to YouTube
by NASAtelevision on Sept. 29, 2010.